Want to track a topic across the web's news sources from the last few years, the last few months, or since yesterday morning? A new Google Labs tool provides an easy-to-navigate headline timeline.

It's an intriguing experiment, though not a complete one by any means. Head over to the timeline site, type in a topic and a time frame, and you get a column-by-column breakdown of certain Google News sources' headlines on the topic. The Timeline can also pull from specific news sources and, in a clever move, dated Wikipedia entries, so you could browse the month-by-month happenings of 1897, if that's how your lunch break goes.

Many major news sources aren't included yet, and the default Time Magazine covers seem a little unncessary—as much as we like to see Kate Winslet in the morning, she has little to do with Google's Android phone. Still, it's an interesting and perhaps mind-orienting view of the news. What kind of timeline tools would you like to have on hand when you're doing research?